[FRIAM] 2019 - The end of Trumpism

[Steven A Smith]

Jochen -

A little less, tongue-in-cheek:

Thanks for the positive thoughts... and I think you can add to your list 
of "isms" we need to understand 'more better' to avoid giving them more 
power over us are other abstractions like "democracy" and 
"capitalism".    I grew up worshiping the latter two unquestioningly and 
climbing the ladders they offered as fast as I could, even though I am 
pretty sure I "heard" the muffled cries of those whose heads I was 
stepping on to "climb" and the "feel" of their fingers under my feet as 
they tried to climb the very same rungs I was clambering up.

_Democracy_ was summarized well for me  (it is only a point-indicator, 
but a significant one) as "Democracy is the tyranny of the majority over 
the minority".   It became most poignant to me in 2000 when the 
Republican's used their outsized lung-capacity to "blow the flipped coin 
of a hung-election over" and then claimed a "mandate".   The Donald and 
the very same Republican Machine did it again (if differently in detail) 
in 2016, shouting MANDATE! even louder.   Had the Dems been able to blow 
the coin over the other way in 2000 or if they had been better at 
gerrymandering and social engineering in 2016 (I claim they were good 
enough at the latter to put Hillary in front of Bernie for the 
"finals"), THEY would have claimed a mandate, although probably with 
less overt belligerence, but perhaps to the same effect... a significant 
tyranny of a pseudo-majority over a pseudo-minority.

_Capitalism_ isn't entirely synonymous with _Consumerism_ but they seem 
very deeply entwined... and the most obvious hazard of Capitalism is the 
truism that we love to hate of "the rich get richer" (and in complement, 
"poor get poorer").  In a time when Bush-II could declare in the wake of 
9/11 "just go out and buy something!" (backed up by a small tax-rebate 
to get the spending pump primed?) as a presumed remedy to keep the 
Terrorist's attack on Wall Street from rippling into the 
consumer-confidence (extravagance?) economy, and now with Trump 
imagining that tearing down any regulatory feedback (legal and social) 
on our exploitative economy is the same as "creating wealth" and that 
hold interest rates near zero (effectively subsidizing big-Capital) is 
the same as having "healthy growth".    It might also be noted that we 
don't have a phrase for "healthy steady-state" or "healthy pull-back".   
We only know how to stimulate growth/expansion/usery/exploitation every 
way we can until the resulting bubble collapses under it's own 
weight/thinness.

A decade or two ago *I* might have responded to this kind of talk with a 
confrontational "so you would rather have totalitarian/fascism???!!!!" 
without thinking far enough to realize that a truly healthy way of being 
(locally and globally) might be something fundamentally different than 
what we've discovered in our myriad experiments in economics and 
politics. At the same time, paradoxically, while *fundamentally* 
different, that difference may be in subtle qualities, not in 
quantity.    It might not require us to deny the fact of human (animal 
appetites) for material comforts and social relevance... and in fact, it 
may depend on doing exactly that without extreme over-indulgences in 
either.    The Trump family is a pretty good example of how we fetishize 
extreme indulgences in both material wealth and social significance.

May 2019 unfold as it will!  I for one, feel lucky to be living in these 
"interesting times", no matter how "inconvenient" many of the details 
seem to be for me, mine, and those much less fortunate than "we".

  - Steve

> I prefer the model of Twain's "history doesn't repeat itself, it 
> rhymes"...
>
> It appears that the great poem of life has lapsed into a riff of 
> thug-rap (taking names and popping caps)...  which could go on for 
> quite a while... apparently there are a lot of folks who want/need 
> that kind of angry/negative me-first energy?
>
> And a slap-happy new year to you too!
>
>> Dear Pollyanna,
>>
>> It will end and we’ll all learn an important lesson?
>>
>> Whew, I was worried there for a minute!
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Marcus
>>
>> *From: *Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> on behalf of Jochen Fromm 
>> <jofr at cas-group.net>
>> *Reply-To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>> <friam at redfish.com>
>> *Date: *Wednesday, December 26, 2018 at 6:53 AM
>> *To: *The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group 
>> <friam at redfish.com>
>> *Subject: *[FRIAM] 2019 - The end of Trumpism
>>
>> Merry christmas and a happy new year 2019! I hope Mueller will finish 
>> his report in 2019 and I assume president Trump will either resign or 
>> be impeached like Nixon, since the House belongs now to the democrats 
>> (Did you know "Mueller" is the German version of "Miller" btw? As you 
>> know a miller is someone who creates the flour we need for life) Then 
>> Donald will spend the rest of his life in prison or seek asylum in 
>> Russia. This would be the end of "Trumpism". But who knows, it's a 
>> complex world. In hindsight we will learn more about "Trumpism" as 
>> well. At the moment it seems to be a mixture of the original Italian 
>> fascism and post-soviet authoritarianism, i.e. the rule of an 
>> authoritarian leader who demands absolute loyalty and trusts only his 
>> family. I believe we can only decode social systems if we really 
>> understand the various forms of *-isms like fascism, nazism or 
>> communism, and how they are related.
>>
>> -Jochen
>>
>>
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> to unsubscribehttp://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> archives back to 2003:http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
>> FRIAM-COMIChttp://friam-comic.blogspot.com/  by Dr. Strangelove
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives back to 2003: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20181226/c4b82ebc/attachment.html>